Last week I was given the opportunity of a lifetime – a chance to sit down with visual effects legend John Knoll. I expected that talking to a man who has defined visual effects for the last 20 years would be a revelation – and I wasn’t disappointed. During the interview, we talked about a lot of things ranging from his first visual effects job, to his ground breaking work in The Abyss, to VFX supervising Star Wars.
What you won’t see on camera, however, is a conversation we had on the subject of shyness and how it keeps a person from succeeding. By nature, John Knoll is a quiet and brilliant guy, who is also extremely modest about his achievements. But what he is not, however, is shy. He has made some pretty bold moves in his career – the boldest of which, I think was a phone call he made when he was a teenager (you’ll hear about it in the interview when it airs on Red Giant TV).
If you’ve kept up with my blog, you know that I think shyness is one of the biggest obstacles to a person’s success. But something I hadn’t considered, and that John pointed out, is that your shyness also keeps others from succeeding, as well. If you are too fearful to give your opinion to people you work with, you’re robbing them of a different perspective that could help them to do better work. You need to remember that most people want to do good work, even if it means hearing some constructive criticism. Shyness keeps you from speaking your mind and helping others grow.
He also talked to me about not bringing work home, and how, when he spends time with his family, he doesn’t think about work. I can tell you that while I work really hard at it, I have a lot of trouble fully disengaging from work at the end of the day. But, frankly, if John Knoll can mentally leave the responsibility of a 300 million dollar film at the office to have dinner with his family, I guess I can learn to do the same.
My budgets, after all, are slightly smaller.
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Looking for other advice or inspiration? Don’t forget to read my article: “You’re Not That Talented, and Other Advice.”
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Really looking forward to the interview.
my too
Can’t wait for the John Knoll interview. I would also like to see interviews with Dennis muren and Rob Coleman
Fantastic. Can’t wait to see it.
I can barely hold myself to see this interview… You posted the news about it in the beginning of the month. Since then, I’ve been coming daily to allbetsareoff.com to see if it’s up or not.
Marcello – just sign up to the newsletter: http://allbetsareoff.com/newsletter/ – I will do my best to send the email out as fast as possible to let you know. It’s coming soon. Some of the content has to be cleared legally for public consumption as we talk about some proprietary stuff. Once it;s cleared we will have the final edit.
mega stoked!
Aharon!
When will the interview be available for us mere mortals? Can’t wait!!!
PS. – thanks for everything.
Rafa – I can’t wait either. However we are still waiting on approval for some of the content. Some of what we talked about may or may not be proprietary info from ILM (John discussed in some detail how he achieved certain effects), and we have to wait to hear back. Once that’s done, we will do the final edit and get them posted.
C’mon Aharon…
You’ll kill us with expectation!
Well it’s been a while… is there some new Info when the interview aires? Or did it already and I just missed it?
filmaniac – We are showing some of it at NAB right now. We will be putting it up within a month.
Continuing the Discussion